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Build Your Brand

How to Build Your Brand and Stand Out In the Crowd

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” –Benjamin Franklin

With so many businesses in today’s market, it’s all about branding – standing out and identifying your business in a positively unforgettable way. You need to build a unique brand for your business. To do this, you must:

develop a successful website

design successful sales collateral items

create a sound business model

select a logo and a color scheme

learn how to make your brand stand out from your competition

Branding your business well, will ultimately result in increased revenues and set you up to become an Affluent Entrepreneur.

Creating Your Brand Helps You Meet the Challenge…

The challenge we all have in business as entrepreneurs is that there is a good chance you and I are not the only ones in our markets offering our type of products and services. As a result, at times we can all get lost in the crowd of others doing what we do. Because of this overcrowding, if you do not do something to stand out, you may find yourself in a position where you aren’t earning what you desire, or worse, find yourself struggling financially.

One of my all-time favorite mentors, thinkers, and marketers on this planet is a guy named Seth Godin who has written numerous books on sales, marketing and leadership.

My all-time favorite book of his is Purple Cow. Godin preaches that the key to success for a small business owner is to find a mans to b different in a unique and attractive way so that his product will stand out from the crowd and be noticed. For example, let’s say you look across a Midwest pasture and see hundreds of black and white cows. Then all of a sudden, you see a purple and white cow. You are certainly going to take notice and do your due diligence to learn more about this unique cow. The same is true with your business. You need to figure out how you are going to be different, unique, and most important, desirable to your clients.

Putting the Purple Cow Strategy to Work…

An example of this purple cow strategy is a pricing model I used on my book Creating Your Own Destiny. After having sold over 100,000 copies, I kept getting emails from people advising me that they applied my book to their lives and their businesses and made an extra $1,000 last month or an extra $5,000. One woman even emailed me with excitement to tell me that one of the principles learned in Creating Your Own Destiny she applied to her business accounted for an extra $10,000 from a recent client.

These success stories made me start to question why in the world some of the best business, real estate, and entrepreneurship books are priced at only $19.95 – $29.95 depending on page count and whether they are hardcover or softcover. when the information included in these books, if applied correctly to your life, is worth virtually tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result of this thinking, and these emails from my readers, I decided to implement a new bold marketing strategy for my book. I decided I would implement if for a year and then measure the results.

See, The Affluent Entrepreneur is kind of like a scientist. We are constantly testing and measuring marketing campaigns and performing trial and error on sales offers. Some marketing and sales strategies work, some don’t; so we adjust, move forward, and invest more time and money into those campaigns that work.

My idea was to be the first to test market the world’s most valuable book Creating Your Own Destiny with a $1,000 price tag on the book. On the inside flap my pricing was listed as: $1,000 US – (Includes two-hour consultation with the author. Without this option, book is $24.95 US)

Well, I tested and measured my results. My first thought was that I hadn’t sold many books, so I returned my pricing back to $24.95. Sometime later I reevaluated this strategy and realized I had actually sold nearly 250 of these books combined with a publishing coaching package at a price point of $3,000 – $4,000. Therefore, maybe I wasn’t that far off my target. My point here, as Seth Godin says, is we need to be different in order to get noticed.

Exercise: List 5 things you can implement in your business ASAP so you will be different, stand out, and get noticed by your prospects.

Pricing, as in the example above, is one of my favorite aspects in the concept of branding. Why? Because the error that Struggling Entrepreneurs make but Affluent Entrepreneurs laugh at has to do with pricing the actual product or service. See, the Struggling Entrepreneur believes that whoever has the lowest price wins. The Affluent Entrepreneur knows that price is one of the last things to consider when marketing your services.

In my next article, I’ll talk about branding “YOU”, so you are memorable.

As a Motivational Keynote Speaker, I can speak on this subject or adapt my subject to your audience.